Few found footage movies are as impactful asLake Mungo. This horrifying, heart-wrenching story is a perfect balance of fear and emotion, using its unique format to present not only a display of eerie apparitions but an investigation into one family’s unresolved grief. Many films have tried to recapture this plot’s gravitas, but none have come as close as Justin Barber’s Phoenix Forgotten. The film (which is free to stream on Tubi) follows a young woman returning to her hometown, sure that her brother’s old videotapes are the key to uncovering the truth behind his disappearance many years ago.The tapes she finds are filled with extraterrestrial mayhem and shady government plots, with our protagonist learning about the horrors her brother uncovered — but that’s not the scariest thing about this film. It’s the sadness of the family at its center that makes Phoenix Forgotten so unnerving, with its title acting as an ironic, devastating antithesis to the way a person’s death can linger and tear apart everyone they’ve left behind. There will never be another Lake Mungo, but if horror fans are looking for a found footage movie that similarly has as much heartbreak as it does fear, they need look no further than Phoenix Forgotten.
